Today is the last day of 2023, and i haven’t posted since August 2022, however, it is merely a coincidence that i am posting at this time after so long. Big changes are coming to my life (and this website), and i want to inform those of you who are tuned in to what you might expect of me in 2024. As of this month, and despite chronic hopelessness and emotional anguish (2023 has looked/felt like hell on Earth to…
In brief: life outside of being a full-time counselor at a dysfunctional inpatient mental health rehabilitation program for people experiencing moderate to severe mental ill-health is challenging for me right now. I have written. Drafts on things that have helped me realize i’m autistic; the word ‘neuroqueer’; and my thoughts on the state of violence in the world. Yet i have not been able to finish them because of my current inability to translate my feelings into thoughts and words….
I wrote my last blog post over a year ago. It was about what it’s like for me to want to suicide every day. A lot has happened for me since then. I graduated with my master’s in social work. Moved back to my hometown, to a house by the beach in the neighborhood i was born in. Got a job near my house where i am earning my LCSW hours. Wrote and delivered a sermon about autism and mental…
I can’t remember the last day that passed without a thought of suicide. I’ve thought about it as long as i can remember. I have suicidal thoughts going back to the single digits (this is not uncommon for autists). Suicidal thoughts are so frequent for me that i often consider carrying a book around to track them, just to know if i ever have days without one. (I haven’t done this for fear that i don’t.) Practically anything can trigger…
Today i’d like to discuss work. And sweat. I have hyperhidrosis. It presents (for me) as excessive sweating on my hands, feet, neck, back, and under-arms. The more i sweat, the more i worry about sweating, and the more i sweat… As you can imagine, this leads to a pretty vicious cycle. It also goes unrecognized by others and is an invisible disability in this way. Showering provides little relief. I am sweating as soon as i step out and…
Allists tap their fingers, but autists self-stimulate (abbr., stim). Put another way, as autistic author melanie yergeau writes, being diagnosed meant that “my hand and full-body movements became self-stimulatory behaviors”. But everyone stims(!), with contemporary (but nascent) research suggesting that “autism traits” are “distributed normally” throughout the entire human population (as discussed here). Semantics aside, stimming has been “re-claimed” (read: claimed) by actual autists (e.g., #StimFreely) as a means of taking pride in our bodies. This post, then, is meant to…
On this blog, i have joked about allism a lot, so i thought i’d take some time to identify the ironic undertones at the heart of allism’s etymology and intended purpose. Specifically, i’d like to talk about what’s not being talked about when i joke about allism. When i read out-of-context jokes about allism, they can (sometimes) seem harsh (if only slightly) from an allistic (read: not autistic) perspective. (Wait, aren’t autists supposed to be unable to empathize?) And while…
My pragmatic language is not a problem for me. It becomes a problem when society values attention over (and as an assumption of) intent. In addition to my ability to make consistent eye-contact (despite finding it uncomfortable in certain contexts), i have an impeccable ability to interpret others’ levels of comfortability and attention based on their body language. For example, i was greeting dogs properly since i was a child; their fear of direct eye-contact/approach and comfortability with indirect eye-contact…
I am White, non-binary, neuroqueer, and disabled. I believe it is crucial to be transparent as soon as possible about my positionality (where relevant) when discussing intersectional issues related to disability (and always starting with Whiteness to highlight how my White privilege directly and deleteriously impacts the other [already-marginalized] communities i identify with). Whiteness’ vague definition, which has been (and still is) debated throughout history, is insidious in the way it de-identifies it-self with race and affords White people the…
Content Warning: trauma, forced compliance, gaslighting When i graduated from university with my b.a. in psychology and human sexuality, i had been in school for 19 consecutive years. By that point, and in spite of my valiant effort to avoid burn-out (by taking my higher education slowly), my candle was burnt at both ends from the oppressive “color-within-the-lines” antiquities of the draconian U.S. public school system. (Clearly bitter; i attribute much of my suffering throughout my education to the [dangerous]…